The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 280 - The Insanity Of Reparations

00:00:00.000 Today on the Matt Wall Show, the Democrats conducted a hearing yesterday on the topic of reparations.

00:00:05.640 But I think there are a lot of very serious problems with the reparations idea.

00:00:09.440 Namely, it's immoral and extremely impractical and simply crazy.

00:00:14.600 So we'll talk about that today.

00:00:16.280 Also, amazing advancements in medical technology are continuing to render abortion obsolete.

00:00:24.760 Though pro-abortion people have not noticed that yet.

00:00:28.060 And so we'll talk about that today as well.

00:00:30.300 And I'll answer your emails on the Matt Wall Show.

00:00:40.000 There was a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday on reparations.

00:00:45.300 Democrats want to discuss the possibility of reparations of a system where presumably black people would be paid by white people for the sin of slavery.

00:00:55.940 Actually, to be more specific, this hearing was meant to discuss a bill which would form a commission, which would conduct a study, which would look at the possibility of reparations.

00:01:08.600 So that's the way everything has to work in a bureaucracy.

00:01:11.360 Now, on the one hand, there is nothing but there's really nothing going on.

00:01:16.020 There's nothing going on here but just Democrats throwing red meat to their far left constituents. 0.96

00:01:22.880 The Democrat Party is drifting.

00:01:25.580 Well, rather, I should say, I guess, sprinting to the left as fast as they possibly can ever further to the left so that today even the mainstream figures in the party today pretend at least to be in favor of reparations.

00:01:40.000 Like the Democrat presidential candidates, most of them, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren and others have come out in favor of it.

00:01:45.760 Now, remember that it was only a few years ago that Barack Obama, when he was president, came out against reparations.

00:01:55.040 Because all the way back then, back just a few years ago, that would have, even to liberals, that would have seemed like a crazy radical idea.

00:02:05.740 But as everything drifts left, things that are crazy and radical start to seem more normal.

00:02:11.240 But it's probably not going to happen because it is just throwing red meat.

00:02:18.100 And I think they know that because it's not a feasible idea.

00:02:21.680 It's crazy.

00:02:23.100 It's incredibly unpopular.

00:02:24.620 Rasmussen did a poll and they found that I think it was like 20 or 21 percent of people are in favor of it.

00:02:31.080 Only 20 or 21 percent.

00:02:33.860 And so it's not a popular idea.

00:02:35.640 So it probably won't happen.

00:02:36.600 And this is a political stunt by the Democrats.

00:02:38.080 On the other hand, though, if the Democrats ever have the power to do something like this, the ability to enact something like this, I think that there's a good chance that they probably would try to do it.

00:02:51.100 And besides, even if this isn't something that will happen right away, it's still worth confronting, I think, and debunking.

00:02:58.160 Because Democrats have a lot of bad ideas.

00:03:00.420 It's what they're known for.

00:03:02.240 And I think we should spend our time.

00:03:05.100 We shouldn't ignore them.

00:03:07.020 We should expose those bad ideas and explain why they are so bad.

00:03:11.720 So I want to do that with reparations today. 0.99

00:03:14.160 I want to talk about why it's a crazy, horrible, stupid, impractical, immoral idea. 0.98

00:03:19.440 I want to go into detail explaining that. 0.98

00:03:23.180 But first, before we get into that, let's take a look at this hearing briefly because there are a few things, a few clips worth looking at, I think.

00:03:31.000 The hearing was, overall, as you might expect, a joke, a disgrace, an embarrassment.

00:03:37.000 And I'm going to play a few clips for you that show that.

00:03:39.740 We'll start with Danny Glover.

00:03:41.100 Now, the Dems brought Danny Glover in to testify in favor of reparations.

00:03:48.520 And they could not have possibly picked a worse spokesman for the issue.

00:03:52.280 Glover is, of course, a famous Hollywood actor who's worth about $40 million.

00:03:56.320 His net worth, then, is 400 times greater than the national median, which is a little bit less than $100,000.

00:04:03.740 And even that is pretty high because that's swayed by the people in the upper income brackets.

00:04:09.700 But if you want to look at the average income of somebody in the middle class, for instance, $50,000 or $60,000, well, Danny Glover's worth $40 million.

00:04:19.460 But his distant relative was a slave.

00:04:22.040 So under reparations, Danny Glover, a man in the top half percent of all income earners, would be paid.

00:04:31.820 And the money paid to him would be extracted from white people, most of whom are quite a bit poorer than his, that he is. 0.51

00:04:39.700 That, of course, would be a travesty.

00:04:44.800 That would literally be the rich taking from the poor.

00:04:47.780 That would be, I mean, that would mean that a poor white guy living in a trailer park somewhere would have his money taken from him and given to Danny Glover.

00:05:02.080 Not just Danny Glover, but Danny Glover would be one of the people who gets that money.

00:05:06.680 Now, this is something that Democrats pretend to oppose, the idea of taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.

00:05:12.600 Every time there's a tax cut for rich people, they say, oh, you're taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich, which, of course, is not taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.

00:05:19.800 That's just allowing the rich to keep more of their own money. 0.94

00:05:21.920 This would literally be, in many cases, taking money from the poor and giving it to people who are more well-off.

00:05:30.260 So here's a little bit of what Danny Glover had to say.

00:05:32.780 A national reparations policy is a moral, democratic, and economic imperative.

00:05:40.840 I sit here as the great-grandson of a former slave, Mary Brown, who was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863, despite much progress over the centuries.

00:06:00.300 This hearing is yet another important step in the long and heroic struggle of African Americans to secure reparations for the damages inflicted by enslavement and post-emancipation and racial exclusionary policies.

00:06:20.760 Now, the writer, Coleman Hughes, also a black man, came out against reparations, and he made the point that this issue is distracting from the real and current issues of today.

00:06:33.760 Nothing I'm about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow.

00:06:41.920 Racism is a bloody stain on this country's history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War

00:06:50.400 to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S. government.

00:06:56.280 But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present.

00:07:03.060 Think about what we're doing today.

00:07:05.420 We're spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times, but incarceration only once,

00:07:13.460 in an era with no black slaves, but nearly a million black prisoners.

00:07:17.980 A bill that doesn't mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men.

00:07:29.180 I'm not saying that acknowledging history doesn't matter.

00:07:32.460 It does.

00:07:33.880 I'm saying there's a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

00:07:40.840 In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow.

00:07:47.780 In 2009, the Senate did the same.

00:07:51.320 Black people don't need another apology.

00:07:54.580 We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. 0.87

00:07:58.340 We need a less punitive criminal justice system.

00:08:01.780 We need affordable health care.

00:08:03.300 And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

00:08:11.140 Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today.

00:08:16.980 They told me that even though I've only ever voted for Democrats, I'd be perceived as a Republican and therefore hated by half the country.

00:08:24.740 Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans, I would end up angering the other half of the country.

00:08:30.580 And the sad truth is that they were both right.

00:08:34.540 That's how suspicious we've become of one another.

00:08:38.160 That's how divided we are as a nation.

00:08:42.560 If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today.

00:08:54.020 We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors. 1.00

00:09:01.700 And we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction, from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants. 0.59

00:09:13.700 What we should do is pay reparations to black Americans who actually grew up under Jim Crow and were directly harmed by second-class citizenship, people like my grandparents.

00:09:26.980 But paying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake.

00:09:31.300 Take me, for example.

00:09:32.380 I was born three decades after the end of Jim Crow into a privileged household in the suburbs.

00:09:40.100 I attend an Ivy League school.

00:09:42.780 Yet I'm also descended from slaves who worked on Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation.

00:09:48.320 So reparations for slavery would allocate federal resources to me, but not to an American with the wrong ancestry,

00:09:55.880 even if that person is living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs to support a family.

00:10:03.160 You might call that justice.

00:10:05.260 I call it justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living. 0.75

00:10:10.920 I understand that reparations are about what people are owed, regardless of how well they're doing.

00:10:16.820 I understand that.

00:10:18.440 But the people who are owed for slavery are no longer here.

00:10:21.980 And we're not entitled to collect on their debts.

00:10:27.900 Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims.

00:10:32.400 So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent.

00:10:38.460 Not just that.

00:10:40.400 You've made one-third of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent.

00:10:46.960 And black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner. 0.99

00:10:55.880 The question is not what America owes me by virtue of my ancestry.

00:11:01.160 The question is what all Americans owe each other by virtue of being citizens of the same nation.

00:11:07.900 And the obligation of citizenship is not transactional.

00:11:12.480 It's not contingent on ancestry.

00:11:14.880 It never expires.

00:11:16.280 And it can't be paid off.

00:11:18.720 For all these reasons, Bill H.R. 40 is a moral and political mistake.

00:11:22.980 Thank you.

00:11:23.720 Yeah, so that sounds like he's making a good point there.

00:11:25.860 But Sheila Jackson Lee says that the issues of today that Hughes mentions, the ones that he says we need to be focused on,

00:11:33.380 well, she says that they're all the fault of slavery anyway.

00:11:35.680 So you've got to talk about slavery because that all can be traced back to slavery.

00:11:39.220 All the problems in the black community can be pinned on slavery, she says.

00:11:42.640 One million African Americans are incarcerated.

00:11:46.200 That is a continuing impact.

00:11:49.600 The black employment rate is 6.6 percent, in spite of what has been said currently.

00:11:55.560 More than double the national unemployment rate.

00:11:58.280 31 percent of black children live in poverty compared to 11 percent of white children.

00:12:02.500 The national average is 18 percent, which suggests that the percentage of black children living in poverty is more than 150 percent.

00:12:09.840 Even in spite of the glorious overcoming of the talent that is part of our community,

00:12:17.600 the scrapping together of making sure our children received education,

00:12:22.100 the putting together something out of nothing,

00:12:24.460 we still have been impacted.

00:12:26.280 And only 57 percent of black students have access to full range of math and science classes today.

00:12:32.640 Black children were vaccinated at rates lower than white children.

00:12:35.780 Education mobility has been limited.

00:12:38.040 Black children represent 19 percent of the nation's preschool population,

00:12:41.500 yet 47 percent of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension.

00:12:46.220 Black students are 2.3 times as likely to receive a referral to law enforcement.

00:12:50.140 So she mentions a whole list of grievances in there, but one, just to highlight one for a minute here,

00:12:56.980 one of the grievances she mentions is that black children are not vaccinated as much as white children.

00:13:03.200 And this is supposed to be because of slavery?

00:13:06.420 Except that if you want your kid to be vaccinated and you bring him to the doctor, he'll be vaccinated.

00:13:12.940 Nobody's being refused vaccination based on their race.

00:13:15.540 That's not happening.

00:13:16.260 If black kids aren't getting vaccinated, it's because their parents aren't taking them in to be vaccinated.

00:13:21.400 How in God's name could that be the fault of slavery? 0.91

00:13:23.780 If you, as an individual parent, make a choice not to bring your kid to the doctor,

00:13:32.040 what does slavery have? 0.99

00:13:34.040 You could have, but you just didn't.

00:13:36.840 And so that's your own choice.

00:13:38.340 Now, I'll be the first to admit, and there is no denying it, of course,

00:13:44.680 that obviously the black community has been profoundly impacted in a negative way

00:13:50.600 by the history of slavery, and then even more so, because it's much more recent, Jim Crow.

00:13:59.440 So there's no denying that.

00:14:02.100 But, and so we could have that conversation.

00:14:05.560 That's a valuable conversation.

00:14:06.860 The only problem is that anytime Democrats have that conversation, they do two things.

00:14:11.060 They want the conversation to lead to taking money, redistributing money, because that's

00:14:16.260 what they're obsessed with.

00:14:17.440 So it all has to, it always has to go there to the redistribution of wealth, as if that's

00:14:23.780 somehow going to fix the problem when it has not fixed the problem at all.

00:14:27.380 The welfare state, which has been going strong now, if we can call it strong for many decades,

00:14:32.540 has not fixed this problem.

00:14:34.260 It's only made it worse.

00:14:35.100 So that's the first problem is that they, it's always redistribution of wealth.

00:14:39.680 And then the other problem is that they cast the net.

00:14:42.600 It's just way too big of a net they cast.

00:14:44.540 They, they, they, they go way too far with it.

00:14:47.780 To the point where, um, rather than talking in a, in a, in a sort of general sense about

00:14:53.780 the, the, the, the situation of black community, they, they try to get into the specifics, things

00:14:57.880 that are clearly just the result of individual choices, like the, uh, the fatherless problem

00:15:02.800 in the black community.

00:15:03.520 Well, um, I guess Sheila Jackson Lee would tell us that that also is, uh, is the fault

00:15:08.320 of slavery, except that no, those are, those are what happens there. 0.78

00:15:10.820 You have, you have individual men, black men in this case who choose to impregnate women 0.98

00:15:16.360 and then not stick around to raise them.

00:15:18.580 That's a choice that they make.

00:15:19.980 They didn't have to make that choice, but they do.

00:15:23.820 Same for, there's also an increasing fatherless problem in the white community.

00:15:28.060 We, this, this is a, this is a cultural problem.

00:15:30.720 Uh, statistically it's much worse in the black community, but it's a, it's a big problem 1.00

00:15:33.980 in the white community too.

00:15:35.120 Um, in all communities and there, it's the same thing.

00:15:38.980 You, you, it doesn't matter what race you are. 0.72

00:15:40.940 You choose to make kids and not stick around for them.

00:15:44.420 That's your choice.

00:15:45.240 You didn't have to choose that you did.

00:15:48.160 So, you know, you're, you're, the, the history of your race or your culture has nothing to do

00:15:52.600 with, with your own personal choice in that case.

00:15:54.840 All right. Um, now for a dose of sanity in these proceedings, representative Mike

00:15:59.580 Johnson tried to explain why the idea of reparations is illegal and unconstitutional,

00:16:05.480 but notice as he lays out his reasonable fact-based case, he gets booed by the crowd.

00:16:11.660 Watch this.

00:16:12.660 Barack Obama opposed reparations when he ran for president in 2008 and Hillary Clinton

00:16:17.360 and Bernie Sanders did as well, eight years later.

00:16:19.960 In addition to all this here in the judiciary committee, we have an obligation to acknowledge

00:16:23.980 that any monetary reparations that might be recommended by the commission created by HR 40

00:16:28.940 would almost certainly be unconstitutional on their face.

00:16:32.280 The reason for that, listen, wait a minute.

00:16:34.620 The, the reason for that is a legal question.

00:16:37.700 See, the legal question is the federal government can't constitutionally provide compensation today

00:16:42.340 to a specific racial group because other members of that group, maybe several generations ago,

00:16:48.080 were discriminated against and treated inhumanely.

00:16:50.360 According to the U.S. Supreme Court, they would refer to that as an unconstitutional racial preference.

00:16:55.500 See, the holding of the 1995 case, Richmond v. G.A. Cross and Company,

00:16:59.380 is that racial set-asides and other entitlements are only permission, constitutionally permissible

00:17:04.220 to remedy the present effects of the government's own widespread and recent discrimination.

00:17:10.160 And the federal government is not allowed to provide race-based remedies that are, quote,

00:17:14.340 ageless in their reach into the past and timeless in their ability to affect the future, unquote.

00:17:18.880 Okay, so there you go.

00:17:21.220 And, and everything he said there is, is, is true.

00:17:27.640 But he gets booed for it because you're not allowed to make any reasonable points

00:17:31.320 at a hearing like this.

00:17:34.360 Now, I'm going to try to break down why this is such a terrible and absurd idea.

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00:19:33.960 All right.

00:19:35.980 So, there are basically two categories of wrongness when it comes to reparations, in my mind.

00:19:43.220 Reparations are morally wrong and also practically impossible.

00:19:46.400 So, let me explain both.

00:19:47.720 Morally wrong.

00:19:49.520 This is really the main point, I think.

00:19:51.140 We can begin and end the conversation right here.

00:19:53.000 It is simply a moral abomination to punish people for the sins of their distant relatives.

00:19:57.640 This is a basic principle that all civilized societies must affirm if they want to be civilized society.

00:20:04.040 You cannot reward or punish people based on events that took place generations ago.

00:20:09.060 It's a very basic thing.

00:20:10.360 Events that did not directly involve anyone who's alive today.

00:20:14.600 If I broke into your house, let's say, and stole cash out of your sock drawer, where everybody keeps their cash for some reason, and then you broke into my house to steal it back, well, you probably still would be breaking the law.

00:20:32.040 But morally speaking, I think you're entirely justified.

00:20:35.160 You're taking back what is yours.

00:20:36.500 You are righting the wrong.

00:20:37.620 And I certainly have no room.

00:20:40.460 I can't complain about that, can I?

00:20:43.300 But if my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather broke into your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's house and stole his money out of his sock drawer, then obviously you would be nothing but a thief if you broke into my house and stole money out of my sock drawer in restitution for the simple reason that I didn't do it.

00:21:02.200 Okay, that's a very basic concept here.

00:21:09.760 I'm not the one who did it.

00:21:12.140 The fact that I'm related in a very distant way to the guy who did, so what?

00:21:16.500 It's the same reason that if somebody goes out and kills another person, you know, if John goes out and kills Bob, we don't put John's brother in jail for it unless John's brother was an accomplice.

00:21:29.500 But if he was just out, you know, across the country minding his business when it happened, we don't punish him.

00:21:33.400 He didn't do it.

00:21:34.420 Yeah, he might be related to the guy, but he didn't do it.

00:21:36.940 Um, so that money in this, in this analogy where you're stealing, that money is mine.

00:21:43.760 It's not yours. 0.78

00:21:44.460 I didn't take it from you.

00:21:45.560 I wasn't the perpetrator.

00:21:46.700 You were not the victim, but now you, you now are the perpetrator and I'm the victim in an effort to write the past wrong.

00:21:54.320 You have just created a new wrong that must now be righted.

00:21:58.220 Okay, but what if you could demonstrate that my great, great, great, great grandfather's thieving behavior caused such a devastating effect on your great, great, great, great grandfather that it's reverberated through the ages.

00:22:12.840 And now your family is in a much worse spot today than they would have been had that that theft never took place.

00:22:18.940 And that's, that's possible, you know, the, the butterfly effect, the butterfly flaps his wings and, uh, in New York.

00:22:24.460 And there's a, there's a tsunami, uh, you know, in the Pacific ocean, um, which I don't think it really works that way, but that's the whole idea.

00:22:32.120 Certainly generationally, there is something like a butterfly effect that takes place.

00:22:36.300 Um, but even so, uh, that doesn't just, this, what if game of, well, if that hadn't happened, okay, well, what if they, maybe, maybe they, uh, if my great, great, great, great, great,

00:22:48.840 grandfather never stolen the money, um, uh, you know, maybe things would be different.

00:22:56.280 That's true, but that doesn't justify you victimizing me to add more injustice will not write that injustice.

00:23:08.280 Now, if we were today to go to bring it back to what we're talking about, reparations for slavery,

00:23:14.720 if we were today only five years removed from the abolition of slavery or 10 years or even 30 years removed,

00:23:21.260 and we were talking about reparations, I would say, yeah, absolutely.

00:23:25.640 But 150 years, six generations, no.

00:23:31.100 But there are many, um, practical problems here as well.

00:23:35.300 So, and, so that's the moral issue, that you're punishing someone for something they didn't do.

00:23:42.320 Pretty simple.

00:23:43.400 Uh, and that's wrong.

00:23:45.960 But there are practical problems as well, which also you could begin and end the conversation here

00:23:50.400 because it's just impossible to sort through these.

00:23:53.740 I'm going to try to highlight those practical problems with just some questions.

00:23:57.220 Some questions that I don't think were covered in the hearing

00:23:59.320 and that the advocates for reparations never seem to address.

00:24:03.080 But here are my questions, all right?

00:24:05.900 Number one, what about black Americans whose families came to America after abolition?

00:24:11.820 Do they get paid?

00:24:14.600 Number two, what about white Americans whose families came here after abolition?

00:24:20.080 Do they have to pay?

00:24:22.020 Number three, what about Native Americans, Native Americans who own slaves? 0.82

00:24:26.060 What about black people who own slaves?

00:24:28.800 Do their, do their descendants pay or get paid?

00:24:31.380 Now, it was, of course, much, much rarer for, uh, for a black person to own slaves. 0.96

00:24:37.240 But there were some black people who own slaves.

00:24:38.760 Don't we need to figure out who they're, who, who they're related to?

00:24:42.040 So we can, we certainly can't pay them, uh, uh, restitution, can we?

00:24:47.440 Number four, what about black people who descend from the tribal chiefs,

00:24:50.760 chiefs in Africa who sold the slaves to white traders?

00:24:55.240 Do they pay or get paid?

00:24:57.020 It seems to me we'd have to sort that out and figure that out.

00:25:02.160 Because remember, slavery, first of all, was a worldwide and universal institution for thousands of years.

00:25:08.600 Um, the North American slave trade specifically was something that was, was, was obviously, we, we had the, the interactions, the transactions that happened in North, North America.

00:25:22.680 But there were also transactions that happened in Africa.

00:25:28.520 And in many of those cases, you had Africans selling other Africans into slave, into slavery, um, which is an abominable evil as well, clearly.

00:25:39.080 Five, what about, um, non-black people who, what about, you know, any, any, any, any non-blacks who were, uh, whose ancestors were slaves in other countries?

00:25:48.440 Think about Jews in Egypt, whites on the Barbary coast, for example.

00:25:53.700 Do they still have to pay?

00:25:55.120 Now, I know you could say, well, eh, but they were slaves somewhere else.

00:25:58.220 And so it doesn't, well, so what?

00:25:59.720 Who cares if they were slaves somewhere else?

00:26:01.300 They, they still will affect, it still happened.

00:26:03.880 Um, you could still argue that their families are affected by it.

00:26:06.780 You could argue that their culture, their race, their ethnicity has been affected by it, the reverberations of it.

00:26:11.400 And if we're, if we're reaching back 150 years, then I don't see a problem with reaching across into a different country.

00:26:18.280 What's the difference?

00:26:20.020 I mean, either way, we're dealing with stuff that didn't happen recently and isn't happening now.

00:26:26.040 So if we're doing that, then I, then why don't we bring these other things into, into play?

00:26:32.700 Um, or what about, uh, what about people who, uh, were, whose families were persecuted and victimized in other ways?

00:26:43.360 Think about how the Irish were persecuted by the British.

00:26:46.860 Think about, again, Jews. 1.00

00:26:49.040 I mean, think about, think about, uh, uh, Jewish people whose, who's, you know, grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust.

00:26:55.560 Do you think the, you know, the situation of Jews today would be different if not for the Holocaust? 0.74

00:27:06.040 I think so.

00:27:09.120 Six, what about someone whose great, great, great, great, great grandfather was a slave owner and great, great, great, great grandmother, a slave?

00:27:17.880 There are plenty of examples of that.

00:27:20.360 Is that someone who has to pay himself?

00:27:22.240 Number seven, how do we know exactly who is descended from who?

00:27:27.600 How are we going to figure this out?

00:27:29.520 Mandatory DNA tests?

00:27:31.700 I guess we'd have to.

00:27:32.940 There'd have to be a national, uh, initiative forcing everyone to get a DNA test so we can figure out who is descended from who.

00:27:42.580 Eight, uh, even if we could know, what about slave descendants who are wealthy today, like Danny Glover, and slave owner descendants who are in poverty?

00:27:50.400 Would the poor have to pay the rich? 0.87

00:27:53.780 And number nine, weren't things like affirmative action already supposed to address this issue?

00:28:01.180 Would someone who got into college from affirmative action still get paid so they end up getting reparations twice?

00:28:09.340 Affirmative action was supposed to address the, the supposed institutional biases in the, in the, that, that's, you know, still, still happening in our society.

00:28:19.020 So, now we're going to have double reparations.

00:28:24.660 So, those are just a few questions.

00:28:26.220 And, uh, those are questions that I think are, those are, those are questions that are unanswerable and, uh, problems that cannot be solved.

00:28:36.040 There's no way you could sort through all of that, uh, in order to make this happen.

00:28:40.060 So, it's just practically impossible and absurd.

00:28:43.300 All right, um, I want to mention this.

00:28:47.160 The Cleveland Clinic announced yesterday that it's successfully completed its first in utero operation to repair spina bifida in an unborn child.

00:28:58.260 And the surgery is just, uh, I mean, I was, I was reading a description of it.

00:29:03.320 It involves a spectacular combination of advanced technology and surgical skill.

00:29:08.040 In fact, here's, um, here's a description provided by the Cleveland Clinic of how this, this works.

00:29:14.920 Just because I find it very fascinating.

00:29:16.760 It says, during the fetal repair surgery, a cesarean section-like incision is made and the mother's uterus is exposed.

00:29:23.300 An ultrasound is then used to locate the placenta and fetus.

00:29:26.980 The uterus is opened 4.5 centimeters and the back of the fetus is exposed, showing a spina bifida lesion.

00:29:33.600 The surgeons then carefully, uh, suture several individual layers of tissue in order to cover the defect.

00:29:40.620 After the uterus is closed back up, the fetus remains in the womb for the remainder of the pregnancy.

00:29:44.500 And it's ultimately born by cesarean section.

00:29:47.200 I mean, this is, it's, it's amazing that they can do that.

00:29:53.400 It really is amazing.

00:29:54.800 And this procedure is not unprecedented.

00:29:56.680 Now, this is the first, I saw this, uh, on social media yesterday.

00:29:59.640 It's the first I'd ever heard of.

00:30:01.000 I didn't know that they could do this, that they could treat spina bifida in the womb.

00:30:05.300 Um, now it's not a cure, right?

00:30:07.440 So they're not at the point yet where they can cure it, where a baby who has this defect will be, will, you know,

00:30:14.100 be born and, and, and we'll have no signs of it whatsoever, but they can drastically reduce the effects.

00:30:20.560 Um, and they can hopefully make it so that for instance, the child will eventually be able to walk on his own and that sort of thing.

00:30:28.080 Whereas otherwise he wouldn't be able to, but, um, this is not entirely unprecedented.

00:30:32.620 The children's hospital Pittsburgh had its own first surgery of this kind a couple of months ago,

00:30:36.840 and it's all part of a, of a relatively new and burgeoning branch of medicine, fetal surgery.

00:30:43.500 Um, which has, uh, the first example of that was back in the eighties, but it's expanded a lot,

00:30:49.200 especially recently, and it's become more common in recent years as the technology has just rapidly

00:30:53.700 improved.

00:30:54.640 Um, and today I was looking at a list on the children's hospital of Philadelphia's website,

00:30:58.540 and they've got a list of a whole host of conditions that I won't read because I can't pronounce a lot of

00:31:04.160 them, but a whole host of conditions that can be treated by fetal surgery, uh, spina bifida just

00:31:08.760 being one of them and more added to the list every year. Meanwhile, when you consider that you think

00:31:14.040 about this and then, uh, think about how the technological advancements have also precipitously

00:31:20.880 lowered the age of quote viability for an unborn child. A couple of years ago, uh, a baby was born at

00:31:28.440 21 weeks and survived. And today she's a healthy toddler, uh, running around and having no problems

00:31:35.000 an extremely premature birth used to be a death sentence, but today babies born before the tried

00:31:42.260 the third trimester routinely survive the baby born the 23rd, 24th, 25th week. Um, most of those babies

00:31:50.280 will survive now. And there's no reason to think we've reached our limit. I think eventually we're going

00:31:55.480 to get to a point where there, there will not be a non viable gestational age. I think eventually we get to

00:32:02.860 a point where, um, a, a human life can be extracted from the womb at any point and put into essentially

00:32:11.280 an artificial womb, which is, which is basically what they do. If you've ever been to a NICU, um,

00:32:17.740 the intensive care unit for, uh, the natal intensive care unit for babies that are born very prematurely.

00:32:23.780 My, my own, our children, uh, the twins were born premature. They weren't born that premature. They

00:32:28.160 were born, um, just a few weeks before, um, before term, but they spent 24 hours in the, uh, in the NICU

00:32:37.700 and you go up there and it's, it's, uh, just, it's not something you ever forget being in a NICU of a

00:32:47.420 hospital. Um, but anyway, what you see is that they essentially put these babies in kind of an artificial

00:32:53.020 womb in a way so that they can continue to grow and develop and get to a healthy point where they

00:32:59.040 can breathe on their own and all that kind of stuff. Um, I think that technology to create these

00:33:06.000 artificial womb like conditions will get to, will continue to develop. And, uh, who knows 20 years 0.53

00:33:12.420 from now or whatever, um, we'll be at a point where, you know, at, at five weeks, you could take

00:33:19.800 the baby out and put it into, um, and it will still survive. Now this is all quite awe-inspiring and

00:33:29.620 wonderful, uh, and incredible, unless, right, you're pro-abortion. Um, these revolutions in medical

00:33:40.800 technology are rendering the case for abortion more and more obsolete by the minute. And things

00:33:48.540 have been trending that way for a long time, ever since they did the first ultrasound back in the

00:33:52.320 fifties. And you could actually see now for the first time, uh, it's hard for us to even to sort

00:33:58.480 of imagine this, but of course, up until that point, when a woman was pregnant, there was, you know,

00:34:03.660 for thousands of years, women were getting pregnant and we, we, there was no way to see what was

00:34:08.300 happening inside there or to know exactly what a baby looks like at that age, uh, at any particular

00:34:14.360 point. Well, with ultrasound technology, you can look in, it's a window into the womb and you can

00:34:19.120 see that, yes, these little humans in the womb are indeed little humans and they look like it too.

00:34:24.240 So ever since then, um, the case for abortion has becoming more and more obsolete. And that,

00:34:29.760 that process is just increasing rapidly in recent years, as we've seen this just technology

00:34:37.360 take off. Um, and the, the introduction of fetal surgery yet again, affirms this truth that those

00:34:47.020 are little human beings in the womb, not clumps of cell cells. Doctors would not be able to treat

00:34:51.560 spina bifida in a clump of cells. They would not be able to repair a birth defect in an inhuman mass

00:34:57.820 of material. They could only do it. They can only conduct these delicate and complicated procedures

00:35:03.020 because the patients are living human beings. And the claim that abortion is necessary has also

00:35:09.460 suffered devastating blows recently. Of course, even without these medical marvels, abortion could

00:35:14.400 never be considered actually necessary. It's never necessary to directly kill an innocent human life,

00:35:18.860 but that's all the more the case now that, uh, any number of fetal defects and abnormalities can be

00:35:24.400 treated. And also the health of the mother justifications don't really work as, as well as they used to,

00:35:30.000 not that they ever really worked because, um, at any point from the middle of the second trimester on,

00:35:36.200 if the woman suffers a cataclysmic complication, she can deliver the baby and the baby will still 0.97

00:35:43.760 survive. There's no reason to kill the baby. This is the position in which pro aborts find themselves

00:35:50.840 rooting against life-saving scientific advancements.

00:35:54.240 And this from the compassionate pro-science crowd, right? Right. Um,

00:36:05.760 all right, we will, I had one other video clip I wanted to play, but I think I'll

00:36:12.640 save that for tomorrow. Um, and we'll go to emails, mattwalshowatgmail.com, mattwalshowatgmail.com.

00:36:20.860 This is from Hannah says, I heard you reading all the positive reviews for your scrambled eggs

00:36:25.660 recipe and felt it necessary to chime in. I really did want it to work. I wanted to enjoy

00:36:30.320 fluffy scrambled eggs, but I just couldn't handle them. I'll concede that maybe being eight weeks

00:36:34.780 pregnant and fighting morning sickness had something to do with it. So for future reference,

00:36:38.040 perhaps you should get a, give a disclaimer with your recipes, not recommended for nauseous pregnant 1.00

00:36:42.420 ladies. Maybe I'll find the courage to try them again in a few months. My husband and I enjoy your 1.00

00:36:46.860 show. Thanks for all that you do. Well, I'll have, you know, Hannah, that my wife is pregnant

00:36:54.060 and I have made her my delicious scrambled eggs and she enjoys them. So, uh, how dare you try to use

00:37:04.340 pregnancy as an excuse for not liking my scrambled eggs recipe? How dare you? All right. Uh, this is

00:37:12.280 from Reverend Larry says, exalted Mr. Walsh. I exhort you to augment your lexicon with the more

00:37:19.380 accurate label of birth supremacists when referring to pro-abortionists. Since they frequently lump

00:37:25.020 conservatives and Christians in with white supremacist bigots, their being on the receiving

00:37:29.460 end of the supremacist label will serve as an annoying rhetorical, rhetorical barrier to their 0.97

00:37:33.780 denial of their own murderous bigotry. Something of which I believe we have a moral obligation to

00:37:39.040 habitually remind them. Um, P.S. It might never to be humble and non-hyberbolic opinion. The most

00:37:47.000 clever article ever written in the history of mankind is yours, is your please stop killing 0.94

00:37:51.260 undocumented infants who are trying to cross the border of the birth canal article. Sincerely,

00:37:56.140 Reverend Larry. Uh, well, I appreciate that. And, uh, speaking of clever, I think birth supremacists 0.54

00:38:00.560 is, uh, is good. I like that. I might, I might take that and run with it. Um, I am, as I've said many

00:38:10.680 times that the left, they're the most commonly used tool in their toolbox is the manipulation of

00:38:19.100 language. Rather than making an argument, they just come up with a different label, a different term

00:38:24.020 or whatever it is they're trying to, they're trying to justify, um, or fight against. And they do that

00:38:31.720 in lieu of making arguments. Well, I think we should, we should, I do believe also we should

00:38:35.160 give them a dose of their own medicine. We should use that against them. Um, and so that's a great

00:38:41.160 idea. I like that. This is from Jeffrey, uh, says you spent five to 10 minutes talking about how the

00:38:45.540 culture is bad because people want to follow OJ Simpson on Twitter and see all the crazy. The day before

00:38:50.780 you literally subjected your entire audience to one of Taylor Swift's most atrocious songs. 0.99

00:38:55.420 She's crazy. And her songs are trash that you played this abomination for us. I admit that I 1.00

00:38:59.720 enjoyed agreeing with you about how she only makes the same boring anti-hater songs over and over,

00:39:03.720 but the very next day you come out and talk about how people shouldn't be going looking for more crazy 1.00

00:39:08.720 and stupid seriously. And you actually followed up the don't go looking for stupid and crazy segment 1.00

00:39:13.680 with a segment about some crazy, stupid, egotistical psychopath who has to make up words because of 1.00

00:39:18.560 how much better than everyone else she is by being an LGBTQ woke scold. I was honestly waiting for 1.00

00:39:25.400 you to drop a sarcastic punchline somewhere connecting the two segments because I thought

00:39:29.380 that level, that level of hypocrisy was reserved for comedy. If we can't follow or pay attention to

00:39:34.620 stupid and crazy, then AOC is clearly no longer a potential topic. Hardly any Democrats are probably 1.00

00:39:39.920 not the president either. Everyone has different opinions on what is acceptable, crazy, and stupid to 1.00

00:39:44.900 pay attention to. Um, okay. So I think, uh, I think Jeff, I did, I did actually, I did, I did think about 1.00

00:40:00.120 that, the, the seeming hypocrisy that you mentioned, because I was talking about how people are following 0.99

00:40:05.160 OJ on Twitter because they want immediate access to the stupid and crazy that he puts out. And I was saying 1.00

00:40:10.980 how unhealthy and pointless that is. And then my very next segment was about, I think it was about

00:40:16.520 the, yeah, it was about the trans poet who's rearranging the alphabet because the normal alphabet 1.00

00:40:21.500 isn't good enough for him, which is both stupid and crazy. So what gives, how can I bring up stupid 1.00

00:40:26.980 and crazy stuff if I'm saying that we should pay less attention to stupid and crazy stuff? Well, the answer 0.99

00:40:32.020 is maybe I am a hypocrite on that front. It's, it's, that's perfectly possible. Um, so that could be it,

00:40:39.100 but I would also suggest that what I try to do with this show and with my writing is weighed into the 0.96

00:40:50.660 stupid and crazy, uh, which is usually not an enjoyable thing for me and then bring it to your 0.98

00:40:57.760 attention. And, and, and, but in order to find the point, to find the lesson that we can learn from it, 1.00

00:41:03.580 what I don't want to do is just hit you over the head with it. Have you like bask in it and then

00:41:10.640 leave you there in the midst of the stupid and crazy. I don't want to do that. I want to get to 1.00

00:41:15.680 the point. I want to get to a conclusion. Um, the problem is when we do sort of just bask in the stupid

00:41:24.920 and crazy just for the sake of it, when we consume it instinctively unthinkingly for purposes of 0.97

00:41:29.860 entertainment or distraction, uh, that's where I think it becomes a problem. Like when you watch,

00:41:34.620 when you, when you sit down and watch three hours of reality shows where the only real attraction, 1.00

00:41:40.900 the only entertainment value is just that these people are being stupid and crazy. Uh, well then, 1.00

00:41:45.320 then you're, you're basket. There's no point to it. You're probably not thinking much about it.

00:41:49.380 Um, you're not sitting there analyzing it or you're probably not writing a thesis about it.

00:41:53.320 You're just basking in it. You're just dwelling in it. You're, you're, you're enjoying it.

00:41:58.540 Um, is the point. And I think that's where it becomes unhealthy. There is a, there is a balance

00:42:06.120 here because there's a lot of stupid and crazy out there. Some of which has no effect on our 0.99

00:42:12.480 lives. Some of, some of, some of it does though. And so we can't ignore it. We can't, uh, just put

00:42:19.680 our blinders on and charge ahead and pretend that we're not living in the society that we are. We can't

00:42:23.780 do that. But at the same time, we don't want to dive into it and just start doing a kind of

00:42:30.700 backstrokes and making ourself comfortable. Right? So I think that's the balance. And I try to strike

00:42:38.860 that balance. I probably don't always do a perfect job of it. So you're right about that. And I also

00:42:46.020 think, you know, as I said, I, I consider it part of my job, it is part of my job to pay attention to

00:42:52.940 this stuff. Um, uh, you know, I offer cultural analysis as a job. That's what I do for a living.

00:43:02.080 Right. And so I do have to pay attention to this stuff. I mean, I have to be on Twitter. People think

00:43:11.560 it's a joke as it's a part of my job. It really is actually part of my job. I have to be there.

00:43:16.940 Um, I wish I didn't. And so that's why I often say to people like, if, if this wasn't my job,

00:43:26.200 if I did something else for a living, you know, if I just, if I worked at an office complex somewhere

00:43:30.300 or anything, I mean, if I did anything else, whatever the job is, um, if it had nothing to

00:43:35.000 do with media at all, nothing to do with offering commentary, nothing to do with forming opinions about

00:43:40.540 society. If I had some other kind of job, I personally, I would not, I wouldn't be on

00:43:46.760 Facebook. I wouldn't be on Twitter. Um, I would spend very little time on the internet. Uh, I

00:43:53.920 probably wouldn't even have it on my phone. I, I would, I would just, I would spend my free time

00:44:00.700 outside. I would, you know, I don't know. I would read more books. I would do other things

00:44:07.160 that have nothing to do with this because it's, it's just, it's exhausting. It's draining.

00:44:15.780 It just sucks the life force out of you.

00:44:21.320 And so that's why I encourage people and I'm not, not trying to be a hypocrite, but

00:44:25.460 if you don't have to be here, if you don't have to be online all the time, you don't have to be on

00:44:31.200 social media all the time. If you don't have to be surrounded by this craziness all the time,

00:44:35.720 then, um, then don't be, I think, you know, really, I think you'll be a lot happier and just

00:44:42.300 you'll have a much more joyful and enjoyable life. If you're not

00:44:47.920 always surrounded by this stuff, if you don't have to be.

00:44:50.500 All right. Um, so that's my little recommendation for the day, my, my, my pro tip for the day.

00:45:01.380 And I guess we'll leave it there. Thanks everybody for watching. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.

00:45:05.380 Hey everybody. It's Andrew Klavan, host of the Andrew Klavan show. Americans have been breaking

00:45:22.660 chains for nearly 250 years. We broke the chains of Southern slavery, the chains of Jim Crow, the

00:45:27.720 chains of Nazism, the chains of communism. It's time for us to rise up as one and break some new chains,

00:45:32.780 the mental chains of identity politics and political correctness. That's on the last

00:45:37.260 Andrew Klavan show before the Klavan-less week. You don't want to miss it. I'm Andrew Klavan.

The Matt Walsh Show - June 20, 2019

Ep. 280 - The Insanity Of Reparations

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